Editorial: Now The Gibson Guitar Raids Make Sense

    The inexplicable raid nearly two years ago on a guitar maker for using allegedly illegal wood that its competitors also used was another targeting by this administration of its political enemies.
    On Aug. 24, 2011, federal agents executed four search warrants on Gibson Guitar Corp. facilities in Nashville and Memphis, Tenn., and seized several pallets of wood, electronic files and guitars. One of the top makers of acoustic and electric guitars, including the iconic Les Paul introduced in 1952, Gibson was accused of using wood illegally obtained in violation of the century-old Lacey Act, which outlaws trafficking in flora and fauna the harvesting of which had broken foreign laws.
    In one raid, the feds hauled away ebony fingerboards, alleging they violated Madagascar law. Gibson responded by obtaining the sworn word of the African island's government that no law had been broken.
In another raid, the feds found materials imported from India, claiming they too moved across the globe in violation of Indian law. Gibson's response was that the feds had simply misinterpreted Indian law.
    Interestingly, one of Gibson's leading competitors is C.F. Martin & Co. According to C.F. Martin's catalog, several of their guitars contain "East Indian Rosewood," which is the exact same wood in at least 10 of Gibson's guitars. So why were they not also raided and their inventory of foreign wood seized?
    Grossly underreported at the time was the fact that Gibson's chief executive, Henry Juszkiewicz, contributed to Republican politicians. Recent donations have included $2,000 to Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and $1,500 to Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn.
    By contrast, Chris Martin IV, the Martin & Co. CEO, is a long-time Democratic supporter, with $35,400 in contributions to Democratic candidates and the Democratic National Committee over the past couple of election cycles.
    "We feel that Gibson was inappropriately targeted," Juszkiewicz said at the time, adding the matter "could have been addressed with a simple contact (from) a caring human being representing the government. Instead, the government used violent and hostile means."
    That includes what Gibson described as "two hostile raids on its factories by agents carrying weapons and attired in SWAT gear where employees were forced out of the premises, production was shut down, goods were seized as contraband and threats were made that would have forced the business to close."
    Gibson, fearing a bankrupting legal battle, settled and agreed to pay a $300,000 penalty to the U.S. Government. It also agreed to make a "community service payment" of $50,000 to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation — to be used on research projects or tree-conservation activities.

IBD

For background on this, see my previous posts Gibson Guitars And The Lacey Act Misused and Gibson Guitar and US Department of Justice reach settlement agreement.

Lumber Union Protectionists Incited SWAT Raid On My Factory, Says Gibson Guitar CEO

by  Bill Frezza

    “Henry. A SWAT team from Homeland Security just raided our factory!”
    “What? This must be a joke.”
    “No this is really serious. We got guys with guns, they put all our people out in the parking lot and won’t let us go into the plant.”
    “Whoa.”
    “What is happening?” asks Gibson Guitar CEO Henry Juszkiewicz when he arrives at his Nashville factory to question the officers. “We can’t tell you.” “What are you talking about, you can’t tell me, you can’t just come in and …” “We have a warrant!” Well, lemme see the warrant.” “We can’t show that to you because it’s sealed.”
    While 30 men in SWAT attire dispatched from Homeland Security and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service cart away about half a million dollars of wood and guitars, seven armed agents interrogate an employee without benefit of a lawyer. The next day Juszkiewicz receives a letter warning that he cannot touch any guitar left in the plant, under threat of being charged with a separate federal offense for each “violation,” punishable by a jail term.

    Up until that point Gibson had not received so much as a postcard telling the company it might be doing something wrong. Thus began a five-year saga, extensively covered by the press, with reputation-destroying leaks and shady allegations that Gibson was illegally importing wood from endangered tree species. In the end, formal charges were never filed, but the disruption to Gibson’s business and the mounting legal fees and threat of imprisonment induced Juszkiewicz to settle for $250,000—with an additional $50,000 “donation” piled on to pay off an environmental activist group.
    What really happened at the Nashville plant?
    Henry Juszkiewicz bought the troubled Gibson Guitar company in 1986. With revenues having dropped to below $10 million a year, the iconic 84-year old guitar maker was bleeding cash and on its way to bankruptcy. Since then, Juszkiewicz turned Gibson around, making it into an international powerhouse, growing at better than 20 percent a year compounded, with current annual revenues rumored to be approaching $1 billion.
    A great American success story? Yes, but Gibson’s very success made it a fat target for federal prosecutors, whom Juszkiewicz alleges were operating at the behest of lumber unions and environmental pressure groups seeking to kill the market for lumber imports. “This case was not about conservation,” he says. “It was basically protectionism.”
     Two months before the raid, lobbyists slipped some arcane supply-chain reporting provisions into an extension of the Lacey Act of 1900 that changed the technical definition of “fingerboard blanks,” which are legal to import.
    With no clear legal standards, a sealed warrant the company has not been allowed to see too this day, no formal charges filed, and the threat of a prison term hanging over any executive who does not take “due care” to abide by this absurdly vague law, Gibson settled. “You’re fighting a very well organized political machine in the unions,” Juszkiewicz concluded. “And the conservation guys have sort of gone along.” Hey, what’s not to like about $50,000?

READ ENTIRE COLUMN

Gibson Guitar and US Department of Justice reach settlement agreement

The US Department of Justice announced today (6 August) that the Gibson Guitar Corporation has entered into an agreement to resolve the investigation into whether the company used illegally harvested wood and ebony, thereby violating the Lacey Act. Under the agreement, Gibson will pay a $300,000 penalty, plus a $50,000 donation to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to help promote conservation of protected trees. In addition, according to a press release issued by the Department of Justice, "Gibson will also implement a compliance program designed to strengthen its compliance controls and procedures. In related civil forfeiture actions, Gibson will withdraw its claims to the wood seized in the course of the criminal investigation, including Madagascar ebony from shipments with a total invoice value of $261,844. During the yearlong investigation, Gibson CEO Henry Juszkiewicz maintained that the company was innocent of any wrongdoing. In a August 2011 press conference, he stated, "We feel totally abused. We believe the arrogance of federal power is impacting me personally, our company personally, and the employees in Tennessee – and it's just plain wrong." Responding to the agreement today, Juszkiewicz said, "We felt compelled to settle as the costs of proving our case at trial would have cost millions of dollars and taken a very long time to resolve. This allows us to get back to the business of making guitars. An important part of the settlement is that we are getting back the materials seized in a second armed raid on our factories and we have formal acknowledgement that we can continue to source rosewood and ebony fingerboards from India, as we have done for many decades."...more

This is the "justice" you get from the feds - spend millions of dollars on attorneys or settle.

For background on this case see my posts:

Gibson Guitars And The Lacey Act Misused

GuitarGate: Three House Committee Chairs criticize Memphis and Nashville raids on Gibson Guitar

CEO of Gibson Guitar a Republican donor; Democrat competitor uses same wood

What Gibson Guitars Did with the Wood the Government Returned

by Victor Keith

In 2011, the Department of Justice conducted raids on the Tennessee facilities of the famed Gibson Guitar company and confiscated large quantities of tonewood that had been imported from India and Madagascar.  The action included armed SWAT teams, with automatic weapons, who apparently feared being garroted with a guitar string by an enraged Gibson employee.  These raids were conducted due to the Lacey Act, which bans the importing of certain woods.  The issue at hand was not that the wood was endangered or illegally harvested, but that it was not of the proper thickness that would have meant that some labor had been performed on it by workers in India and Madagascar.  This was the law in Madagascar and India as a nod to the unions in those countries.  Gibson, who hand-makes its guitars, cannot guarantee the craftsmanship of its products if a portion of the work is done outside their facilities.


What raised many eyebrows about this governmental action was that the countries involved, India and Madagascar, indicated that they were not interested in pursuing the matter when contacted by the Department of Justice.  Also, even if Gibson had been guilty, this would have been a civil, not a criminal matter.  Finally, this same kind of tonewood is used by other guitar makers such as CF Martin and Company and Fender.  Those other companies were not raided.  The principle difference seems to be that those companies contributed to Democratic candidates, while Henry Juszkiewicz, the CEO of Gibson, gives openly to Republicans, and Gibson has plants in a right-to-work state.


After spending nearly two and half million dollars in legal fees and paying a $300,000 fine, the government has settled with Gibson and has finally returned the confiscated tonewood.  Normally that would be the end of the story, with a victory scored for partisan government bullying of political opponents, however, that is not the end.


Gibson took that wood and made it into the Government Series II Les Paul.  These special edition guitars are hot stamped in gold with the Government Series graphic, which is an American bald eagle holding a Gibson guitar neck.  It is an admirable statement of defiance of an abusive government and a refusal of a historic American company to be intimidated.


Victor Keith writes from Burbank, California and can be contacted at victorakeith.com.

Originally posted at American Thinker.

GuitarGate: Three House Committee Chairs criticize Memphis and Nashville raids on Gibson Guitar

U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn joined the chairmen of three House committees in a letter Friday to Obama administration officials criticizing the raid on Gibson Guitar facilities in Memphis and Nashville and calling their actions "unwise in the extreme." The Tennessee Republican's letter went to the director of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and Atty. Gen. Eric Holder and refers to "troubling reports regarding your agencies' investigation of the Gibson Guitar Corp." Blackburn and House Speaker John Boehner invited Gibson's CEO Henry Jusziewicz to be their guest in the Speaker's Box at the joint session of Congress Thursday night to call attention to the case. Boehner's office put out a statement about his guest that read in part: "Armed federal agents have twice raided Gibson Guitar's facilities. Why? Unelected Washington bureaucrats won't say." In their letter, Blackburn and the chairmen say the deputy director general for foreign trade for India "has stated that India would allow the exports." She said Juskiewicz has said he has been importing the same woods for 17 years "without issue." "We are deeply troubled by the suggestion that if Gibson had the skilled work done in India, using the same wood, instead of here in America, then the importation would have been legal and the Department of Justice would not have carried out this heavy-handed enforcement action," the letter writers wrote...more

CEO of Gibson Guitar a Republican donor; Democrat competitor uses same wood

On Thursday I posted an article about the US Fish & Wildlife Service shutting down the Gibson Guitar factory in Downtown Memphis to serve search warrants in an ongoing investigation. That article said they were investigating the "use of woods banned from commercial use for environmental reasons."

However, the Gibson Guitar Co. has issued a press release, some of which is excerpted below:

On August 24, 2011, around 8:45 a.m. CDT, agents for the federal government executed four search warrants on Gibson’s facilities in Nashville and Memphis and seized several pallets of wood, electronic files and guitars. Gibson had to cease its manufacturing operations and send workers home for the day, while armed agents executed the search warrants. Gibson has fully cooperated with the execution of the search warrants...The wood the Government seized on August 24 is from a Forest Stewardship Council certified supplier and is FSC Controlled, meaning that the wood complies with the standards of the Forest Stewardship Council, which is an industry-recognized and independent, not-for-profit organization established to promote responsible management of the world’s forests. FSC Controlled Wood standards require, among other things, that the wood not be illegally harvested and not be harvested in violation of traditional and civil rights...

The press release also contains this little jewel:

The Federal Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. has suggested that the use of wood from India that is not finished by Indian workers is illegal, not because of U.S. law, but because it is the Justice Department’s interpretation of a law in India. (If the same wood from the same tree was finished by Indian workers, the material would be legal.) This action was taken without the support and consent of the government in India.

About all this, Andrew Layton writes:

This unfortunate event begs the question, Why Gibson?

Putting aside the presumably misguided motivation to enforce another sovereign nation’s laws, why would a homegrown American company be the target of the Department of Justice in the first place?

It’s worth pointing out that Henry E. Juszkiewicz, Gibson’s Chief Executive Officer, is a donor to a couple of Republican politicians. According to the Open Secrets database, Juszkiewicz donated $2000 to Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN07) last year, as well as $1500 each to Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN). Juszkiewicz also has donated $10,000 to the Consumer Electronics Association, a PAC that contributed $92.5k to Republican candidates last year, as opposed to $72k to Democrats. (The CEA did, however, contribute more to Democrats in the 2008 election cycle.)

When warrants as ridiculous such as these are issued and executed, there appears no other reason than because the company or individual at hand is being targeted, not because there is any sort of wrongdoing. As a company, Gibson is a legendary. They’ve done nothing wrong, except, apparently, deigning to have a Republican CEO.

The plot thickens, however.

One of Gibson’s leading competitors is C.F. Martin & Company. The C.E.O., Chris Martin IV, is a long-time Democratic supporter, with $35,400 in contributions to Democratic candidates and the DNC over the past couple of election cycles. According to C.F. Martin’s catalog, several of their guitars contain “East Indian Rosewood.” In case you were wondering, that is the exact same wood in at least ten of Gibson’s guitars.

I used to prefer the Martin.

Gibson Guitars And The Lacey Act Misused

I don't know Gibson CEO Henry Juszkiewicz personally but I know others who run guitar companies large and small and I know guitars are not like most businesses; you can't be an MBA and just walk in there, and you can't be the head of a dishwasher company and get hired from outside to run a guitar company.  You have to know guitars to run a guitar company and that means caring about them - and thus being a fanatic about wood (see Guns, Guitars and Greenpeace for efforts by guitar makers to be part of the environmental solution to sustainable wood). In 2009, after the latest Lacey Act amendment, and with a new administration in power, federal agents raided the Gibson company offices over wood from Madagascar - Madagascar had a coup so is it now a 'legal' government or not?  No one can say but suddenly the wood was suspect, according to the Fish&Wildlife Commission.  The company filed a lawsuit in protest and then a few weeks ago they were raided again, this time over wood from India. The dispute is over Indian Ebony, all completely documented and legal except for this interpretation business. The Indian government "prohibits the export of sawn wood" but does not prohibit the export of veneers, sheets of woods that have already been worked on. The Feds say the wood was falsely declared as veneers because some assembly is still done in the U.S rather than India. Worse, says Juszkiewicz, the government told him if he would just have all of the work outsourced to India, the problem would go away. Yes, we've had the worst employment month since World War II and someone in the government that created this mess is telling an American company to outsource more jobs. Gibson has been importing the wood for decades with no issue, it is only the latest wrinkle and someone in the Justice Department now interpreting Indian law - it's clearly in the legal framework of the Lacey Act but, as I said, the legal framework sometimes needs to allow for common sense. What should never happen is the American government hinting to an American company they should outsource more jobs to meet an obscure part of an American regulation the company helped lobby to put in place to insure ethical resources...

Hank Cambell also asks this question:

Why has the Environmental Investigation Agency, a militant group funded by progressive billionaire George Soros, been lobbying the Justice Department so hard to go after Gibson?

He then finishes his column with:

And this new interpretation means I can't take an old guitar with me on an international trip, because when I come back, I won't be able to document where every piece of wood came from - no one can, on any old guitar.   Under the Lacey Act and its interpretation by the Obama administration, they can just take my heirloom.  It also means a staunch ally of responsible environmental practices, guitar makers, now have to start looking for ways to tear down the Lacey Act - or move their companies overseas.

And NPR reports:

Attorney Ronald Bienstock says the Gibson raids have aroused the guitar builders he represents because the Lacey Act is retroactive. He says they're worried they might be forced to prove the provenance of wood they acquired decades ago. "There hasn't been that moment where people have quote tested the case. 'What is compliance? What is actual compliance? How have I complied?' We're lacking that." He's even warned clients to be wary of traveling abroad with old guitars, because the law says owners can be asked to account for every wooden part of their guitars when re-entering the U.S. The law also covers the trade in vintage instruments. Nashville's George Gruhn is one of the world's top dealers of old guitars, banjos and other rare stringed instruments. "It's a nightmare," he says. "I can't help it if they used Brazilian rosewood on almost every guitar made prior to 1970. I'm not contributing to cutting down Brazilian rosewood today." Gruhn acknowledges that the government has tried to create exemptions to cover vintage instruments. But he says they are rife with delays and to play it safe he's nearly eliminated the 40% of his business that used to deal with overseas buyers...

What a mess, all brought to you by "feel-good" Republicans and environmental zealots.

After Gibson Raid, Other Guitar Makers at Risk of Breaking Law

It's as sweet a sound as you can imagine. A $10,000 guitar expertly crafted by the hands of Dave Berkowitz, a master luthier in Washington, D.C. But Berkowitz's guitars include fretboards and bridges made from Indian rosewood and ebony, which the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service declared to be illegal to import in its actions against Gibson Guitar back in August. Now, every time Berkowitz uses that wood to build his immaculate instruments, he is potentially breaking the law. "I use the exact same ebony and rosewood fingerboards that were confiscated in August from Gibson," Berkowitz told Fox News. Does that mean he is "engaging in illegal business practices?" "Well, technically speaking, yes, because they have declared the materials I'm using illegal," he said. But whether the Indian rosewood and ebony that Berkowitz and Gibson -- and so many other guitar makers -- use is really illegal depends on who is asked. According to the Indian government, fingerboard "blanks" -- the wood that will eventually become a guitar's fretboard -- are legal to export. "Fingerboard is a finished product and not wood in primary form," Vinod Srivastava, India's deputy director-general of foreign trade, stipulated in a letter dated Sept. 16. "The foreign trade policy of the government of India allows free export of such finished products of wood." The U.S. government disagrees. In its affidavit to search Gibson, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service considers fingerboard blanks to be raw materials, not finished product -- illegal to export from India and, therefore, illegal to import into the United States. What's more, according to the complaint, the Gibson wood was imported with an incorrect tariff code, which was off by one digit from the correct code. Luthiers Mercantile International, the company that imports the wood for Gibson, claims that was a simple clerical error. The difference in the codes refers to the thickness of the wood -- more than or less than six millimeters in thickness...more

Federal agents search Gibson Guitar factory in Memphis

Federal agents with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service shut down the Gibson Guitar factory in Downtown Memphis today to serve search warrants in an ongoing investigation, officials said. Nicholas Chavez, special agent in charge for U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Region 2 in Albuquerque, N.M., said agents also served a search warrant on Gibson Guitar in Nashville. In November 2009, agents for the service searched the guitar maker's manufacturing plant in Nashville, reportedly during an investigation of use of woods banned from commercial use for environmental reasons...more

Gibson: Feds Want Guitar Woodwork Done by Foreign Labor

Gibson Guitar Corp. is claiming the Obama administration wants more of its woodwork done overseas, as a bizarre battle heats up between the government and one of the country's most renowned guitar makers. The dispute started in 2009, when federal agents raided the company over suspect wood shipments from Madagascar. Gibson took that case to court but has denounced the administration with a vengeance after agents returned late last month to raid several Gibson factories -- this time out of concern that Indian export laws had been violated. Though some reports on the dispute have cited environmental concerns, court documents suggest the latest battle boils down to a simple, non-environmental question -- which country is working on the wood? Gibson's CEO has said repeatedly that the only reason his company is in trouble is because U.S. workers are completing work on guitar fingerboards in the United States. In an interview earlier this week, CEO Henry Juszkiewicz claimed that the U.S. government even suggested Gibson's troubles would disappear if the company used foreign labor...more

Gibson goes on the offensive

Eleven days ago, Gibson Guitar CEO Henry Juszkiewicz was getting ready for work when he got a phone call at home from his assistant, whose voice sounded panicky. Half a dozen armed federal agents with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service were searching the Gibson executive suite. Two of the company’s South Nashville guitar factories also had just been raided, along with one in Memphis. By the time Juszkiewicz (pronounced Juss-ka-witz) reached his office, agents were forensically imaging his computer and carting out boxes of paperwork and company hard drives. At the factories, agents were loading trucks with pallets of rosewood and ebony, guitars, guitar necks, computers and shipping documents. It was the second time in the past two years Gibson had been raided by federal agents in search of illegal imported woods. A 2009 case hasn’t led to any charges against the 117-year-old guitar maker, although it is continuing. In both instances, federal authorities spelled out in search warrants that they suspect the company was illegally importing protected hardwoods from rapidly dwindling rain forests to make prized Gibson guitars. In recent days, Gibson’s CEO has gone on a counterattack, telling various talk radio and TV news programs that the raids are an “outrageous abuse of federal power” that have unfairly singled out his company, perhaps for political reasons. “There’s no doubt we’re being persecuted,” Juszkiewicz said. “But while I was sitting in my conference room, while agents blocked the door to my office, I decided two things. One, we were going to try and fight this in court. Secondly, we were going to give this issue visibility.”...more

Guitar legend Les Paul dies at age 94

Les Paul, the guitarist and inventor who changed the course of music with the electric guitar and multitrack recording and had a string of hits, many with wife Mary Ford, died on Thursday. He was 94. According to Gibson Guitar, Paul died of complications from pneumonia at White Plains Hospital. His family and friends were by his side. As an inventor, Paul helped bring about the rise of rock ‘n’ roll and multitrack recording, which enables artists to record different instruments at different times, sing harmony with themselves, and then carefully balance the “tracks” in the finished recording. A tinkerer and musician since childhood, he experimented with guitar amplification for years before coming up in 1941 with what he called “The Log,” a four-by-four piece of wood strung with steel strings. “I went into a nightclub and played it. Of course, everybody had me labeled as a nut.” He later put the wooden wings onto the body to give it a tradition guitar shape. In 1952, Gibson Guitars began production on the Les Paul guitar. Over the years, the Les Paul series has become one of the most widely used guitars in the music industry. In 2005, Christie’s auction house sold a 1955 Gibson Les Paul for $45,600...AP

Gibson Guitar plant in Nashville raided by feds

An international crackdown on the use of endangered woods from the world's rain forests to make musical instruments bubbled over to Music City on Tuesday with a federal raid on Gibson Guitar 's manufacturing plant, but no arrests. Agents of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service made a midday appearance and served a search warrant on company officials at Gibson's Massman Drive manufacturing plant, where it makes acoustic and electric guitars. Gibson issued a statement saying it is "fully cooperating with agents of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service as it pertains to an issue with harvested wood." The company said it did nothing wrong. Federal officials declined to say whether anything was removed from Gibson's plant or what specifically the agents were trying to find. But some exotic hardwoods traditionally used in making premium guitars, such as rosewood from the rain forests of Madagascar and Brazil, have been banned from commercial trade because of environmental concerns under a recently revised federal law...read more

The price just went up on older Gibson guitars. All you musicians and all us listeners can thank the USFWS. We'll have to go back to stretchin' animal skins over a drum...if the animal rights folks will let us.

Stringing Up Gibson Guitar

On a sweltering day in August, federal agents raided the Tennessee factories of the storied Gibson Guitar Corp. The suggestion was that Gibson had violated the Lacey Act—a federal law designed to protect wildlife—by importing certain India ebony. The company has vehemently denied that suggestion and has yet to be charged. It is instead living in a state of harassed legal limbo. Which, let's be clear, is exactly what its persecutors had planned all along. The untold story of Gibson is this: It was set up. Most of the press coverage has implied that the company is the unfortunate victim of a well-meaning, if complicated, law. Stories note, in passing, that the Lacey Act was "expanded" in 2008, and that this has had "unintended consequences." Given Washington's reputation for ill-considered bills, this might make sense. Only not in this case. The story here is about how a toxic alliance of ideological activists and trade protectionists deliberately set about creating a vague law, one designed to make an example out of companies (like Gibson) and thus chill imports—even legal ones...more

Guitars, "Good" Laws & Gov't Regs Don't Mix

I have previously posted on this issue with Federal agents search Gibson Guitar factory in Memphis and CEO of Gibson Guitar a Republican donor; Democrat competitor uses same wood.

Most of The Westerner today is devoted to this issue, since it involves both endangered species and music, two issues we endeavor to cover here.  Plus, this is a prime example of how "do-good" legislation sponsored by a Republican and signed into law in 1900 by a Republican President, and later amended and signed into law by George W. Bush to include wood, can have far reaching consequences never envisioned by the proponents.

Once a power of this nature is granted to the government, you can rest assured it will be abused.

Gibson: Plants ‘Up and Running’ Following Raid

Gibson Guitar Corp.’s chairman and CEO says the storied guitar maker is getting its operation back in tune following a raid last week by federal agents of the company’s factories and offices in Memphis and Nashville. “We’re back up and running at all our plants,” said Gibson CEO Henry Juszkiewicz about the aftermath of the Aug. 24 raid in both cities, during which agents seized several pallets of wood, electronic files and guitars. While acknowledging the facilities that were closed after the raid have now reopened, he said production is not back to normal levels because of the seizure of a substantial amount of inventory. During last week’s press conference, he valued the materials taken by agents from the company at around $1 million. In later interviews with reporters, he upped that estimate to between $2 million and $3 million. “So we’re trying to figure out what raw materials we have (with which) to build and what we can get in the short term to fill in some very large holes in our production planning,” Juszkiewicz told The Daily News in a phone interview from his Nashville office. Gibson’s CEO said the company employs almost 2,000 people in the U.S. and has hired several hundred new employees in the U.S. in the last two years...more

Man Buys Guitar at Garage Sale for $175, Turns Out It's Worth $800,000

John McCaw is a building contractor from San Diego who struck jackpot way back in 1969 without even knowing it. The story actually began in 1962, when John Lennon and George Harrison of The Beatles got themselves a pair of matching Gibson J-160E guitars. About a year later, John's six-string was stolen after the band's pre-Christmas show in London. A few years later Mr. McCaw's friend had unknowingly bought Lennon’s Gibson in a local music shop. In 1969, that friend sold it to McCaw for about $175, or about $1,100 when inflation-adjusted for 2014. 45 years later, after using the legendary J-160E to teach his sons how to play guitar and strumming on it during many amateur jam sessions throughout the decades, McCaw got a hold of a 2012 issue of Guitar Aficionado. The magazine featured George Harrison wielding a six-string with striking similarities to John's old guitar. After reaching out to international experts, McCaw had the guitar examined and, lo and behold, got a certificate of authenticity based on a string of contributing factors...more

Tennessee Reps Prepare Bill to Protect Guitar Owners After Gibson Raid

Tennessee lawmakers alarmed over a recent federal raid on Gibson Guitar factories in their state plan to introduce a bill aimed at protecting instrument owners from being punished under the same law that snared the legendary company. Reps. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., on Thursday plan to introduce a proposal to amend the so-called Lacey Act. The expansive law makes it illegal to buy, sell or travel with certain wood products, and requires owners to carry specific documentation for others. The lawmakers say this threatens musicians, antique dealers and others who travel with products containing rare plant or wood materials. The amendments would "grandfather" all instruments and furniture made before May 22, 2008, when the law was last updated to cover exotic woods, so owners of those products would not face prosecution. "Innocent buyers of such products before 2008 should not be punished," a statement released by the lawmakers' office said. The amendment would also try to clarify portions of the act that require compliance with foreign laws, calling on the government to put together a database of all relevant laws. Plus the amendment would reduce the paperwork necessary to import and export musical instruments and furniture manufactured before that 2008 date...more

Too bad there's nothing about the LEO's and the way they conducted the raid and confiscated property. 

No room for EPA ‘strong-arming’

Michael and Chantell Sackett wanted to build a house on some land they owned a few blocks from Priest Lake in Bonner County, Idaho. Little did they know at the time that their efforts would attract the attention of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulators and ignite a national discussion on the Obama administration’s regulatory strong-arm tactics.
    The Sacketts’ “violations” seemed benign: They filled a half-acre of wet land on their property with dirt and rock and began the building process. A few months later, they received a”compliance order” from the EPA demanding that they immediately restore the site in accordance with the EPA’s Restoration Work Plan or face fines of up to $75,000 a day.
    The Sacketts asked the EPA for a hearing, as they did not believe their property was subject to EPA review. The Sacketts said their property was not adjacent to the lake, and the half-acre of wet land was not “navigable water” within the meaning of the Clean Water Act. They said the landfill they used, therefore, was not an “illegal discharge” into “navigable waters” banned by the Clean Water Act.
    The EPA denied the request for a hearing, and a federal district court and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected their request for review of the policies that had deprived them of “life, liberty or property, without due process of law” in violation of the Fifth Amendment.
    Having nowhere else to go, the Sacketts made a Hail Mary appeal to the Supreme Court. Amazingly, the court heard the case and on March 21 issued a rare unanimous decision ordering a review of what it called the EPA’s “strong-arming” tactics.
    After reviewing the facts and the stretched definition the EPA gave to “navigable waterways,” the Supreme Court acted strongly and decisively...

Mr. Shapiro then writes:

This case is hugely significant, as it is a rare, unanimous rebuke to an overreaching federal government. That all nine justices, including two Obama appointees, would agree the administration was “strong-arming” is quite astounding. Moreover, that a unanimous court would reverse the action of two lower federal courts demonstrates a rather strong disconnect and serious emotional revulsion to the heavy-handedness of the administration in this case.
We can only hope this judicial rebuke of strong-arm regulators will extend beyond the EPA, as Obama administration regulators are consistently demonstrating the same kind of government strong-arming the EPA used in this case. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service sent 30 armed agents to raid a Tennessee Gibson guitar factory, taking inventory and property, apparently because some bureaucrat in a cubicle wrongly thought Gibson had violated another country’s laws, in spite of the fact that the other country, India, hadn’t been consulted. The National Labor Relations Board tried to give labor unions negotiating power by hassling the Boeing Co. for building a job-creating factory in South Carolina. Those examples are just the tip of the iceberg. According to the Heritage Foundation, the Obama administration has rushed through four times the amount of rules issued by the George W. Bush administration in the same amount of time...

We all share the "revulsion", so let's hope Shapiro is right about the significance of this decision.

Judge Napolitano Slams DOJ Over Gibson Guitar Raid - video

http://youtu.be/GOMnGROs31M

The Judge and Fox are focusing on the DOJ because of recent events, and it was the DOJ who released info on the settlement with Gibson. However, it was agents with the US Fish & Wildlife Service who made the raids and who chose to use SWAT-military type tactics.